India and Singapore are not on some common developmental trajectory, with Singapore further ahead. Our starting points and journeys are completely different. For instance, Singapore never had to deal with the deep-rooted chauvinism that exists in certain quarters of Indian society.

Rather than looking to India, better instead to emulate the likes of Iceland, which topped the World Economic Forum’s 2012 “Gender Gap Index”. Among its many other remarkable signs of progress here, in early 2009, Iceland elected its first female prime minister, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, who also became the world's first openly lesbian head of government.

Amanat will always be in our hearts. Her legacy should serve to remind the world that wherever we are, whoever we are, we must continue the struggle to achieve gender equality in our own societies.
Each country, including Singapore, has its own challenges that need to be addressed.

Singapore today said it would cite the "heartbreaking case" of the 23-year-old Delhi gang- rape victim as an example to reject demands for abolition of death penalty in the city state

In a Facebook post, Singapore's Minister for Law and Foreign Affairs K Shanmugam said people were "sickened" by the horrific gang-rape and her subsequent death here.

Describing the attack on the Delhi girl as a "heartbreaking case", Shanmugam said he would often cite cases like these as examples when he discusses with people who want the death penalty in Singapore to be abolished.

The family of an Indian gang-rape victim said Monday they would not rest until her killers are hanged as police finalised their investigation before charges are laid against suspects this week.

As the ruling Congress party reportedly pushed for tougher punishments for sex crimes, including chemical castration, authorities in New Delhi launched a hotline to improve safety for women in a city dubbed "India's rape capital".

Around 400 university students gathered in central Delhi on Monday, vowing to continue their "movement" until better safety measures are put in place and the guilty punished.

One of hundreds of attacks reported in New Delhi each year, the gang rape and murder of a medical student caught authorities and political parties flat-footed, slow to see that the assault on a private bus had come to symbolize an epidemic of crime against women.

In the moments before the December 16 attack, the 23-year-old woman from India's urban middle class, who had recently qualified as a trainee physiotherapist in a private Delhi hospital, and her male friend, a software engineer, were walking home from a cinema at a shopping mall in south Delhi, according to a police reconstruction of events.

A bus, part of a fleet of privately owned vehicles used as public transport across the city of 16 million, and known as India's "rape capital", was at the same time heading toward them. Earlier that day, it had ferried school students but was now empty except for five men and a teenage boy, including its crew, police said. Most of the men were from the city's slums.

The vast majority of doctors who have been struck off in the past five years were trained abroad, new figures from the General Medical Council show.

The full extent of the danger presented by foreign doctors working in the health service can be revealed. New figures from the General Medical Council (GMC) show that the vast majority of doctors who have been struck off were trained abroad.

Singapore likely slipped into recession in the three months to December, analysts told AFP on Monday, as data showed growth in 2012 came in lower than expected.

In his New Year’s message, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said “growth was slower this year, at 1.2 percent”, which is well off the official growth forecast of 1.5-2.5 percent.

However, CIMB Research economist Song Seng Wun said the figures for the year indicate the economy shrank 3.5 to 4.0 percent quarter on quarter in October-December, which followed a contraction of 5.9 percent in the previous three months.

Singapore's economy grew by 1.2 per cent in 2012, hurt by weakness in the West and Japan as well as problems faced by some local companies in hiring workers, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said on Monday.

"Growth was slower this year, at 1.2 per cent. The weak U.S., European and Japanese economies dampened our growth, but some industries have also had difficulty hiring the workers they need to grow," Lee said in his New Year message.

"Next year we expect to grow by 1-3 per cent. In our new phase, we must expect slower growth than we have become accustomed to," he added.

The third exitCrusty but brilliant Lee Kuan Yew, for decades modern Singapore’s founding leader Singapore, is on record as admitting he is anything but a religious believer in one-citizen, one-vote democracy. He thinks the world can do better.

He puts it this way: “I do not believe that one-man, one-vote, in either the US format or the British format or the French format, is the final position. I mean, human society will change over the years.”

Okay — but will it change for the better? Will the world some day look back on what disappoints Lee as in fact the best we could do in terms of political organisation?